


A Series of Strange Blunders

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: AUSTEN Jane - Works, Emma - Jane Austen
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Comedy of Errors, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 11:53:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10898829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Emma Woodhouse is quite convinced that Harriet Smith is fated for Mr Elton: her visions can mean nothing else.





	A Series of Strange Blunders

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seori/gifts).



> For seori, belatedly, for her birthday, with thanks to Lisa and Fred who beta'd it for me. Title is obviously drawn from Emma itself, and there are snippets of dialogue and text lifted from Austen's books elsewhere. But I make no claims to authenticity, especially because I just made Emma Woodhouse into a witch.
> 
> This is basically the same AU as I used in my Georgette Heyer fic _His Lordship's Latest Start_ , in case anyone should be interested.

"I wonder," Mr Knightley began, frowning at the fire, "if you know what you are about, Emma."

 

Emma, taken quite by surprise, smiled her astonishment and gently closed the drawing-room door. "Mr Knightley! I might have been anyone."

 

Mr Knightley raised his head, and looked at her as if he was quite as shocked as she was. "I recognised your step," he said, still serious. "And I could hardly think that so excellent a hostess as you would leave me to my own devices without some message."

 

"How gratifying," Emma laughed, taking her seat by the tea-tray she had ordered and pouring two cups, "to be thus predictable."

 

Mr Knightley managed a faint quirk of a smile. Emma started to think him really serious.

 

"My father is not really ill," she said soothingly. She waved a hand, indicating the cup of tea made precisely as Mr Knightley had always liked it. "He has merely been put into a fright by Mrs Malton's injudicious reference to an epidemic cold.  Anyone could have told her how it might be. You have seen the dreadful work I have had to soothe him, all this evening!"

 

Mr Knightley had walked over and picked up his tea-cup as if distracted; mid-sip, he lowered the cup and grimaced, apparently involuntarily.

 

Emma frowned. She had first served tea to Mr Knightley when she was fourteen, mere days after Isabella's marriage and the first dinner Emma had ordered for herself; she had been almost trembling with a jubilant self-importance she now thought vaguely laughable, but she had still got it right, and she had never failed since. A taste of her own tea proved it was much as ever.

 

The fire guttered. Emma murmured a long-practised cantrip, the familiar words falling from her lips with a frost-burn on her tongue; the fire burned silver for a few moments, and steadied in the grate. Even her father might have approved its glow, little though he believed in the capacity of any true-mage to provide healing or comfort.

 

"I did not mean your father," Mr Knightley said at last. "I can see he is as well as ever; I am familiar with his -"

 

 _Fancies_ , Emma thought, unfilially but with a great deal of affection.

 

"-constitution," Mr Knightley supplied, after an apparent internal struggle. "No, Emma, it is this business of Harriet Smith that concerns me. I cannot think you have realised the damage you may be doing to a perfectly unexceptional girl of her order."

 

Emma, caught between incredulity and amusement, lowered her tea-cup from her lips. "Mr. Knightley! What can you mean?"

 

"A girl of no claims, with no family and no education that signifies, a parlour-boarder at Mrs. Goddard's school - to be turning down a respectable offer of marriage from a man who truly esteems her - Emma, I fear you have been putting ideas in her head that will do her no justice and no favours."

 

Mr Knightley, having been delivered of these strongly-worded remarks, sat down with the air of one who has set aside a great burden and eyed Emma with a curious mix of relief and trepidation.

 

Emma could not help but smile. "My dear sir. I think you rate Harriet's claims rather lower than they deserve."

 

Trepidation began to overtake relief in Mr Knightley's steady grey eyes. Emma pushed the little china plate of delicacies her father would never tolerate - but which Mr Knightley enjoyed - towards him, by way of reassurance. He accepted one mechanically.

 

"Men do not care for clever or for sensible wives so much as we are often told," Emma continued, still smiling, her own tea-cup resting lightly on its saucer in her lap. "A sweet girl such as Harriet, a gentle, good-natured and beautiful girl, wanting only a little more polish, may pick and choose. For shame, Mr Knightley - you would have her accept her very first offer, at the age of seventeen, when she is but just beginning to be known!"

 

"It is by no means certain another may ever be made to her!" Mr Knightley said, in suppressed but still explosive tones. "Consider her family, her want of connections or even respectable parentage. Emma, you can hardly think -"

 

"I think that she is a gentleman's daughter," Emma said. "And that she associates with gentlemen's daughters, no-one can deny." She took another sip of her tea and met Mr Knightley's eyes calmly. "I have been trying to discover who her family might be, but Harriet knows very little and is quite content -"

 

"Very proper!"

 

"-she has indeed a great delicacy of feeling," Emma acknowledged, though part of her thought vaguely that this in some sort showed a lack of spirit. "I admit I have sometimes wondered if her father is perhaps a magister. I think I have a sort of inkling of it, and you know, it is one of my particular gifts." She had known of John Knightley's regard for Isabella longer than anyone else, and it had been by her diligent exercise that Mrs Weston's long-lost relations were found and invited to the wedding.

 

It had not occurred to her that her privileged access to Isabella in one case, and the energies she had expended on writing letters and making enquiries in the other, had been of more use than her carefully nurtured second sense. Indeed, if such a fancy had crossed her mind, she would have dismissed it at once – for nobody of sense took any account of such small things.

 

"Oh, Emma!" Mr Knightley cried. "Better to be without gifts than misapply them as you do! You only ever see what you wish to see!"

 

Emma was really a little offended, thinking of her careful preparations with the silver bowl and the vervain, and the lengths to which she had always gone to clarify her visions. She thought, as well, of the care with which she had made her more mundane observations, of Mr Elton's riddles and his rhapsodies over Harriet’s picture – although she was confident that her gifts could not have misled her. "I assure you I could not be mistaken. You must believe that I have taken the greatest care!"

 

"I believe that _you_ believe that," Mr Knightley said with a sigh, finishing his tea. Emma poured him a second cup at once. "Emma, I wish I could believe that this will all be well."

 

"Then take comfort," Emma said firmly, "in knowing that I do, and I have been at such pains to study the case, I could hardly be mistaken."

 

Mr Knightley's smile was very small, and bitterly rueful more than it was affectionate; Emma could plainly see that he did not take comfort in her words, and that he was still displeased with her, but Emma treasured this proof of his continued value for her nonetheless.

 

"Only consider the sermon this morning," Emma said, choosing an example of Mr Elton's great regard for Harriet that Mr Knightley could hardly take exception to. "How beautifully Mr Elton expressed himself on the magical gifts in nature, and the glory of God that we see in them!" Emma had thought his expressions rather overwrought, but Harriet, sitting rapt in the Hartfield pew with her wide blue eyes upturned to Mr Elton and her lips parted a little, worshipfully, had found them quite as wonderful as the Word itself. "We were speaking of it, you know - speaking of my sense of Harriet's gifts."

 

"I know," Mr Knightley said, watching Emma in such a way that Emma knew he was, for some reason quite beyond her, very seriously displeased. He could not, she thought uneasily, believe her to have acted maliciously or unkindly; she had only done, was only doing, what woman's feelings demanded and justified. "Emma, I wonder you cannot see that his feelings tend in quite a different direction. He will not marry imprudently."

 

Emma laughed this off, for all a creeping uncertainty assailed her and she wondered if she had truly acted rightly. Impossible to doubt! Impossible, having seen the proofs of affection that Emma herself had seen, impossible, having sought verification in her magic! She could not have been mistaken in that image of Mr Elton's elegant hands joined with those of a small, fair-skinned woman, or that fragment of a passionate declaration gleaned from the future, ringing around the curve of the silver bowl she used for scrying. Emma knew of no other candidate for Mr Elton's affections; no other person who so exactly fit his requirements, certainly none to whom he had shown such marked attentions. And yet - Mr Knightley's judgement had always been so good, so exactly suited to Emma's notions of what a right-thinking person ought do, and Emma had long been in the habit of taking her mark from him, as much as she had done from dear Mrs Weston - !

 

It was difficult to be comfortable under such circumstances. Emma was not, even when Mr Perry came to the drawing-room to offer a very reassuring portrait of his patient, though Mr Woodhouse had insisted on being bled quite unnecessarily, and had refused a healing cantrip as inappropriate to his disorder. Mr Perry was thanked, and offered refreshment, and politely conversed with, but Emma was all the time longing to speak to Mr Knightley alone, to offer him further proofs of the sincere and mutual attachment between Harriet and Mr Elton.

 

She was not to have the opportunity. Mr Perry spoke briefly of a trifling cold for which he had attended Mrs Martin and one of the Misses Martin, and the possibility that Mrs. Malton's parish duties had caused her to become confused about its general prevalence in the area; Mr Knightley, apparently reminded of Robert Martin's ill-advised proposal, frowned and looked very forbidding. He was quiet until Mr Perry had left, and took his own leave very soon after, saying that it would otherwise be quite impossible to find his way, even though it was a fine, clear night and the moon very full, the roads those which he had always known, and which knew him in return.

 

Emma opened her mouth to say something and found her words stolen. She closed her mouth again, looked down at the flounced hem of her pink round gown, and looked back up at Mr Knightley.

 

"I really think I must take my leave," he repeated, and bowed slightly. There was an anger in his eyes before which Emma quailed; not because she was afraid of it, but because it made her doubt her own judgement so dreadfully. "Good evening to you, Emma. Give your father my best wishes for his return to health."

 

"Good evening to you," Emma echoed, and rejoiced that her voice was steady. She had no touch of glamour in her true-magic; she could not dissemble. But at least she should appear to have that confidence in her own judgement that she knew she ought to feel.

 

From the upstairs window of her bedroom she could see Mr Knightley walk around the corner of Hartfield, striding purposefully along the lane to Donwell Abbey under the clear light of a full moon. Before the lane sank into the ground and she lost sight of him, she saw the trees bend towards him as they did when his power was not completely quiescent, recognising the blood and the magic that had held the lands surrounding Donwell Abbey since King Henry sat the throne. Their branches tossed in a wind that wasn't there; the leaves twisted towards him. Emma could almost hear them rustle.

 

Strongest on his own ground, Emma thought, and keen in his judgement.

 

She let the curtain fall closed and looked back into her warm, comfortable room. It was precisely as it had been since she had made it over when she was sixteen, in a style that was still very elegant; the ewer and basin and the silver bowl shone in their accustomed places, and the small shelf of books her mother had left her gleamed as they usually did even though no candlelight fell directly on them.

 

Emma took a deep breath. No. Mr Knightley's instincts were never less than excellent, but in this, at least, she must allow herself to have a keener eye.

 

Nonetheless, her sleep was troubled.


End file.
